Draft:Karlo Štefanek

• Comment: Doesn't meet WP:NARTIST. Lacks WP:SIGCOV too. Safari Scribe^{Edits! Talk!} 19:03, 22 August 2024 (UTC)

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Štefanek performing Against Self, for the Perforations Festival in Zagreb, June 2024

Karlo Štefanek is a multidisciplinary artist from Zagreb, Croatia based between Zagreb, Amsterdam and New York. His practice explores the dynamic between personal perception and external observation. Štefanek frequently examines how identity is constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed through the mediums of self-portraiture and performance.

Štefanek’s most notable work is his ongoing self-portrait series Self-titled, started in 2022. The idea that presence is always unstable and subject to deconstruction is present in the works such as The Artist Has Died, and Missing from the same series. In the work The Artist Has Died, Štefanek radically declares his own death in Croatian national newspaper Jutarnji List. By doing so, he poses a provocative question of must an artist die to gain respect, and who actually determines the end of an era or art itself — the audience, critics, institutions, or the creator of the work? The work preceding The Artist Has Died is the work Missing, in which the artist uses the format of a missing person poster and displays it across cities like Amsterdam and New York as commentary on the figurative disappearance of identity and reflections on his own mortality.

In his most recent work, Against Self, Štefanek takes on a dual role, becoming the protester and the one protested against, marching through Zagreb for the Perforations Festival. This performance questions identity as a constant battle fought for and against, as both an internal and external conflict, as well as a contrast between the individual and collective self. This, along with the artist’s other works, combines provocative and socially engaged elements, challenging viewers to reflect on their identities and the forces that shape them.